The commonwealth of Massachusetts has officially thrown its weight behind Microsoft's Office Open XML format along with the OASIS Open Document Format. In July, the commonwealth added Microsoft's format, also known as Ecma-376 or Open XML, to the list of approved standards in a draft of the Massachusetts ETRM, an architectural framework used to identify the standards, specifications and technologies that support Massachusetts' computing environment.

If the standards folks were not paid off (and I am not saying they were not), than theoretically, the OpenXML for should be convertible to ODF by any outside vendor or group that puts forth the effort, isn't that correct? And to backwards engineer a piece of FLOSS software to convert documents from OpenXmL to ODF should be possible shouldn't it (and not punishable by Microsoft in the courts)?

I understand that the submitted snow job paper work that Microsoft gave to the standards folks is designed specifically to obfuscate things and not truly open the standards. But isnt there enough info in that drek to backwards engineer things to create such a tool?

If this is the case, maybe those who can code should quit whining and (as I am sure Linus would agree) dig into the documentation (all 2 semi trucks of it) and get to reading to either

A)point out that it is not truly open to the standards folks or

B)else get coding so that we libre users can free ourselve from .doc?

I am not a programmer; I have indeed only begun learning Ruby the past few months and have only begun to get an inkling of an understanding of the time, effort, and brain power to create complex code.

But the thermodynamic cost (time, money, ATP) of either doing that versus pushing the ODF format (both through marketing and promotion as well as code maturation) against Microsoft should be weighed and assessed and then the appropriate action attempted before we just throw our hands in the air and give up.

Personally, as soon as Open Office started usig ODF, I converted all my documents to it as they were smaller then and easier to archive. If I could help with my minisule Ruby knowledge, I would, though such a high level language is probably not the correct tool for the job...

Any light shed here would perhaps help me understand things a bit better... Until then, thanks for reading and GO ODF!...

"If the standards folks were not paid off (and I am not saying they were not), than theoretically, the OpenXML for should be convertible to ODF by any outside vendor or group that puts forth the effort, isn't that correct? And to backwards engineer a piece of FLOSS software to convert documents from OpenXmL to ODF should be possible shouldn't it (and not punishable by Microsoft in the courts)?

I understand that the submitted snow job paper work that Microsoft gave to the standards folks is designed specifically to obfuscate things and not truly open the standards. But isnt there enough info in that drek to backwards engineer things to create such a tool?"

Your question is filled with so much BS FUD that I was tempted to ignore it. But for education of the other readers:
There is already a Micrsosoft-sponsored open source project (hosted on SorceForge, no less) for a converter that converts between ODF and OOXML (as much as is feasible, given the different feature sets). The code is their for all to see, if you don't trust the code. http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net